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No Talking

In hopes to encourage diversity, a large Fortune 500 corporation went out on a limb and hired several cannibals. “You are all part of our team now,” said the HR manager during the welcome briefing. “You get all the usual benefits and you can go to the cafeteria and eat whatever you want for free, but please don’t eat any of the other employees.” All of the cannibals promised they would not.

A few weeks later the cannibals’ boss remarked, “You’re all working very hard, and I’m very pleased with all the great work you are doing. However, one of our secretaries has disappeared. Do any of you know what happened to her?” The cannibals all shook their heads, “No,” they said.

After the boss left, the leader of the cannibals said to the others angrily, “Alright, which one of you idiots ate the secretary?”

A hand rose hesitantly in admission. “You fool!” said the leader, “For weeks we’ve been eating managers and no one noticed anything, but nooo, you had to go and eat someone that actually DID something around here!”

Some people think that the biggest divide in this country is between Democrats and Republicans, while others think it is between women and men, but for me the real division is between the talkers and doers.

Stop for a minute and think about the things that have improved our lives the most over the past one hundred years — medical advances, transportation, dramatic improvements in housing, and the computer revolution. I find it strange that those who created these things — the doers — are by in large not our heroes. Oddly enough, our heroes in America are the talkers who complain about the doers.

The talkers (who have created nothing to help build our country) constantly criticize those who created something, because that something was considered to be not good enough or the benefits turned out to have costs.

The first example – the automobile has raised our standard of living to levels that our grandparents would not have dreamed of, yet the Ralph Naders of the world become the hero for complaining about the safety risks and how they pollute. They (the talkers) completely overlook the trucks that got goods to people more cheaply (dramatically raising the standard of living) and ambulances that daily rush people to hospitals to save their lives.

Home-ownership is far more widespread among ordinary people today than in the past because of entrepreneurs who have taken on risk to discover how to build bigger and better houses at prices that are more affordable to more people. But can you name any of those risk takers who have been celebrated for their contributions to their fellow human beings? NOPE. Most everyone in the business of producing housing is likely to be demonized as one of those evil greedy developers.

As for computers, no one put them in more people’s hands around the world than Microsoft. And no company world-wide has been hit with more or bigger lawsuits as a result.

Why can’t the talkers leave the doers alone? Perhaps it is because that would leave the talkers on the sidelines, with their uselessness being painfully obvious to all, instead of being in the limelight and “making a difference” — even if that difference is usually negative.